Macron and Starmer head for Washington

Both President Macron and Keir Starmer will be in Washington next week, trying to persuade Donald Trump to back down over Ukraine and stop giving Putin everything he wants. It will be a wasted trip. Trump has made up his mind that he prefers to deal with Putin if he is going to end the war in Ukraine. The Europeans - and Ukrainians - are a side issue for him but he will go along with hearing the appeals from Macron and Starmer. The only thing he will support is the idea of a purely European peacekeeping force for Ukraine but since the likelihood of this happening is about 100-1, I doubt Trump has given it much thought. Sergey Lavrov who has been around (as Russian foreign minister) longer than anyone else on the global political stage apart from his boss, Vladimir Putin, has made it abundantly clear that this concept is unacceptable. So it seems no matter how much huffing and puffing there is from Macron and Starmer, including talk of sending fighter planes to patrol the skies over Ukraine, Moscow will not sign anything with this in the small print. Trump has stated before that he likes Starmer and thinks he is doing a good job. But his opinion will have changed somewhat after Starmer rejected his description of Zelensky as a dictator and to emphasise his point he rang the Ukrainian president to give him his full support. Trump won't have liked that, so Starmer could get the cold shoulder. Macron might fare a bit better but I suspect both leaders will return to their capitals with a Trump rebuke in their ears.